Acknowledging your people is important, embracing their ideas is not just powerful but is second to none in engaging teams in the direction of the company’s goals.  I found this recently when working with a service delivery team of a 700 employee organisation.  We needed the team to respond positively to the Company’s strategic plan in increasing brand awareness and community engagement.  After workshopping workflow, discussing important data and literally experiencing the customer journey, we brainstormed ideas how we could tackle issues, breakdown bottlenecks and improve the customer experience.  Similar to the story of the rocks, pebbles, sand and water… the team was reminded of what is most important… if we can solve the big issues first… the small ones will fall into place.  We were then able select half a dozen of the best ideas which supported the strategic plan most closely and formulate a methodology that improved the customer experience to improve brand and community engagement - with the teams buy in … win, win.